Thursday, October 23, 2008

Common Servers View for Eclipse

There is a cool collaboration happening right now between WTP and DTP to build a shared Servers view that will replace the separate WTP's Servers view and DTP's Data Source Explorer view. The new view is built using the Common Navigator framework and will make it easy for other Eclipse Projects to contribute content. One of the important goals is to reduce clutter on user's workbench by collapsing many individual views into one. If you are interested in this effort, you should check out Bug 252239. There has also been some relevant discussion on Bug 245013 and Bug 247934.

3 comments:

Konstantin, I don't see this as a replacement, but more of another way for folks to consume this information. I would surmise that at least in DTP's case, we would keep the Data Source Explorer around for the foreseeable future. There's use cases for a unified view and there's use cases for a subset.

I am surprised you would say that. What would the use case be for a stand-alone view if all the content in that view is also present in the common view? Assuming the common view is well designed to let the users filter out and/or collapse content they don't care about, they could easily focus on just databases.

One of the goals for WTP with this effort is to reduce the number of views in the Java EE perspective. In particular, we would be looking to remove the Data Source Explorer from that perspective once it's function is covered by the common servers view.